Adirondack's Inner Self
1/30/04
This spectrum - the first taken of a rock on another planet - reveals the different iron-containing minerals that makeup the martian rock dubbed Adirondack. It shows that Adirondack is a type of volcanic rock known as basalt. Specifically, the rock is what is called olivine basalt because in addition to magnetite and pyroxene, two key ingredients of basalt, it contains a mineral called olivine. This data was acquired by Spirit's moessbauer spectrometer before the rover developed communication problems with Earth on the 18th martian day, or sol, of its mission.